The increased mobility of individuals, transports, and supplies has been accompanied with an increase in the value of the knowledge regarding the location of the individuals, transports, and supplies. Devices that receive signals from Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites are generally available to members of the public. The GPS receivers generally inform the individual holding the unit of his location on Earth, but these GPS receivers do not typically transmit the location of the individual. Thus, the coordinates are useful to the individual, but not to someone that wants to find the individual.
Systems used by the armed forces for transporting goods, supplies, and materials (e.g., logistic systems) may have access to radio transmitters to report the location of vehicles and/or units to headquarters. When manually coupled with a GPS receiver, an individual in a unit can inform headquarters of his or her position by orally relaying the coordinates via radio.
Similarly, corporations may have systems in place to track cargo transports. The transports can manually report location information to a corporate operations center or they may utilize point-of-reception reporting. The point-of-reception reporting includes updating the location of a good or supply when the item is processed by an intermediate facility.
Since mobility is increasing, it is important for individuals, the military, and corporations to be able to track and report the location and status of vehicles, individuals, and cargo back to others. The size of the separate components of the communication system, however, and the awkwardness of the manual combination of the components by an operator, make it infeasible to efficiently utilize GPS technology to track and transmit locations and status information back to others. These technologies lack a unified arrangement of the separate components that maximizes and incorporates each of their respective functionalities while simultaneously reducing the space required to carry or incorporate them.